10/01/2008 @ 6:00PM

The Entrepreneur

The dream life, for many people, means living large in Hollywood. For Jeff Rosen, it meant leaving Hollywood behind. He found his paradise–and his ideal career–when he quit his film-industry job and moved his family to the small town of Ojai, Calif., where he was diverted to an unexpected destiny.

This pint-sized Shangri-La is only a short journey from L.A, but it’s a long, long way from Jersey City, N.J., where Rosen was born 56 years ago. As a young man, he pursued a dream that was really his mother’s: that he should become a doctor. He was a pre-med major at the University of Miami, but failed to get into med school. He ended up a municipal bond salesman in Florida, pitching his wares to retirees. Later he became a stockbroker. Then he tried his hand at operating a restaurant in Coconut Grove, but it went out of business.

“I never knew what I wanted to be, and that was a big problem,” Rosen says. “No direction, no career-mindedness–and I was getting old.”

In 1987, at the age of 35, he moved to Los Angeles, where he finally found his professional footing. He worked as an agent for directors who specialized in television commercials. His clients included David Fincher, who went on to direct such feature films as Seven and Zodiac.

“I was making good money,” Rosen says. “And being in Hollywood was fun.”

But as time passed, Rosen found himself outgrowing the Hollywood scene. In 1995, he got married. By mid-2000, he and his wife, Nancy, were expecting their first child. At this point they were living in Marina del Rey, and Rosen was working as director of marketing for a post-production firm in Santa Monica. This was the good life, as many people would define it. But Rosen no longer saw it that way. Now in his late 40s, he was getting too old to party with younger colleagues–and they seemed to be getting younger every year. Nor did Rosen want to raise his family in the city.

“I wanted to live in America,” he says. “So I had to get out of L.A.”

He found his escape route by accident in the summer of 2000. Nancy, a commercial photographer, had a shoot for Bon Appetit magazine in Santa Barbara. Rosen went with her. On the way back home, they detoured to Ojai on a whim and checked in to the landmark Ojai Valley Inn.

Ojai was a revelation to Rosen. It exudes small-town charm, but it also boasts a thriving art scene. Each weekend its many upscale restaurants fill up with day-trippers from L.A., 75 miles to the southwest. They stroll along Ojai Avenue from art gallery to art gallery, enjoying stunning views of the Topa Topa Mountains and breathing in the smog-free air. Rosen was struck by an inspiration: Why settle for visiting Ojai when he could live there every day?

“It’s got everything you can imagine,” he says. “And it’s a great place to raise a family.”

Some people would agonize over the decision to give up a thriving career and move out to the boondocks. Not Rosen. “I had quite a bit of money saved up,” he says. And with the couple’s first child on the way, the timing seemed right. The Rosens bought a fixer-upper house on a five-acre lot, and moved in later that fall with their newborn son.

Nancy segued from commercial photography to fine-art photography and joined the Ojai Studio Artists group. Jeff set about fixing up the house, a process he enjoyed immensely. “I have this need to work with my hands,” he says. Soon, he had identified his dream occupation: buying local real-estate properties, fixing them up and flipping them for a profit. “You have to have that entrepreneurial spirit,” he says. “I think that’s the career I’ve always had in mind all along.”

His biggest project so far has been the Ojai Café Emporium, a restaurant he bought in 2005. Under the Rosen regime, the restaurant’s dining room did double duty as an art gallery, with Nancy curating exhibits featuring local artists. The couple sold the restaurant earlier this year for a tidy profit, and Jeff is now searching for his next project. In the meantime, he works on his golf game. “I’m not at all bored,” he says.

Nor are the Rosens suffering financially as a result of their move to Ojai. A few years ago they built a new house on their property, the better to accommodate their growing family. (A daughter was born in 2002.) These days Jeff is driving a new Jaguar convertible, and Nancy just bought a horse.

Rosen’s mother apparently still clings to her original vision for him. “She probably still wishes I was a doctor,” he says. But for Jeff Rosen, the dream life is being a small-town entrepreneur–and doing it in beautiful Ojai, far from the madding L.A. crowd. “In the end,” he says, “it worked out well.”